Let’s start with a stock photo.
Here is an image of a family at a fast-food restaurant. Apparently, they’re having the time of their lives. Mom is delighted. Sis is enjoying a corn dog. Junior is exultant. Dad is grinning so hard that he can’t even chew. Plus, there’s plenty more “food” on the table ready to enjoy. Yay!
Now let us turn our attention to reality. Specifically, a scene I witnessed just a few days ago.
My wife and I had just dropped out beloved son off at the airport to join his girlfriend and other friends for a ski trip in Salt Lake City. We made it to the airport just in time, and he was on his way. Eager as Mrs. Bear and I were to get home to make sure little Duke was all right, we were hungry and decided to do something very unusual, which is to stop for a bite at a fast-food joint.
To be clear, this wasn’t a McDonald’s. I think in my many decades on this planet, I have eaten at McDonald’s products maybe three times, and that was from having no other choice. We instead went to a place called Five Guys, which has tasty burgers at not-super-low prices; their cheeseburger, for example, is about fifteen bucks these days. Still, splitting a cheeseburger was just what we wanted, so my lovely wife and I eat got a little serving of the “free” peanuts they have and awaited our order.
Even though my wife and I we’ve known each other since we were kids, we never run out of things to talk about, so we were just sitting there, chatting away, and glancing at the news on our phones. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a very fat man in his 30s lumber into the place, followed by his equally fat wife and their rather portly kid, whom I’m guessing was probably about ten or eleven years old. From all appearances, it looked like hitting up a fast-food joint for a family dinner was a regular practice for this trio.
This post doesn’t really have to do with the fact they were fat, however. Hell, I could lose a few pounds myself, but the lifetime of a chartist doesn’t lend itself to being svelte. What I want to address is their behavior, or lack thereof, which troubled me so gravely that I kept wondering if I should write a post about it. I’m not sure where this post is going, because it’s revealing itself to me as I’m typing, but I know I have to get this out of my system.
The family sat at a table near ours, and the restaurant was just about empty. The mother hoisted herself out of the chair and headed to the bathroom, and the boy, clad in a synthetic baseball uniform which fit like a sausage casing over his body, turned himself around in his chair, away from his father, and look off into nowhere.
The scene, therefore, was the father sitting at the table normally, looking ahead at absolutely nothing, and the son sitting next to him, yet turned away and looking also at nothing. There was absolutely no conversation and no connection. If they were an adult male and female, I would have assumed it was just a date going horribly wrong. Instead, it was a father and son who were existing, inanimately, side by side.
The mother came back from doing whatever it is she had to do on the toilet, and she plopped herself back in her seat. The three of them sat, utterly silent, making neither eye contact nor conversation. Everything about them seemed completely dismal and empty. The grim scene was only punctuated by the arrival of their sack of food, which they quickly distributed and began wolfing down.
I daresay the taste of salt and fat in their mouths was the highlight of their day.
What I was going to type next that is that I’m aware I have a privileged life, but that isn’t the right word. There’s nothing “privileged” about it, since that sounds like some kind of gift that someone thrust into my hands. I’ve busted my ass all my life to live the life I live. The only real “privilege” is the fact that my wife is way, way out of my league, and my overachieving children can largely credit their own success in life to her genes and ethics over and beyond any contribution on my part.
All of which is to say that as I looked at this family, I was reminded of my own words in my novel’s first interstitial, which reads as follows:
Yet only thirty feet farther out to sea, the flamboyant hues and abundant shapes of life gave way to the drab. A small, round stone lay on the seafloor, coated with brown moss. A few feet away was a second stone, similarly shaped, and likewise adorned with dullness. Then another. And yet another. And so it went, for the entirety of the millions of square miles of ocean covering the planet. A ceaseless progression of the unremarkable, the unseen, and the plain.
For those fortunate few inhabitants swirling around the rainbow rocks in the warm, shallow waters of the Seychelles, the alien depths of the ordinary ocean might as well have been another world altogether. One did not know the other. Yet every creature on the paradisical reef intuitively understood it was exactly where it belonged.
I suppose this idea of a “ceaseless progression of the unremarkable, the unseen, and the plain” haunts me for some reason. Maybe it’s my own dread of being ordinary. Maybe it’s the pity I feel for those whose lives are so utterly empty and banal. More than anything else, I suppose, it is the bewilderment that anyone could find themselves with their own family and have absolutely nothing at all to say.
These people’s lives are bad, but they are ignorant of the fact it’s going to get way worse. Being a working schlub wasn’t such a bad thing in the 1950s. Look at the pop culture icons like The Honeymooners or All in the Family for evidence of that. For reasons this trio simply doesn’t understand, their way of life has been steadily diminishing for decades, and the pace of that diminishment is only going to accelerate.
Sociopaths like Curtis Yavin (who is a hero to many members of the new “dark enlightenment” administration) would like to see those three literally put into a meat grinder and fed to cows for nourishment. For myself, I just feel sorry for them, because, in all honesty, I cannot imagine living day to day in the equivalent of a crumbled brown lunch sack with no real life, and no real hope.
